As a poet, screenwriter, and educator, I’m interested in the intersections between art forms and how those art forms may unearth events, people, and concerns of the forgotten past. I see poetry as a visual art form as much as film is, and I think film can be as lyrical as a poem.

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Finds evocative new ways to connect us to a shared storytelling heritage.―Entertainment Weekly

Jordan is a wizard at capturing vernacular in both conventional forms and his own invention." ―Black Issues Book Review

For several books now, A. Van Jordan has been proving himself master of the dramatic monologue. His skill is especially dazzling in The Cineasteas he turns to cinema, that other realm of persona and projection. With an imagination illuminated by empathy, Jordan inhabits the eye of the camera, the eye of the actor, and the ‘I’ of a viewer tethered to image and history. These terrific poems give shape to lives made of light. —Terrance Hayes

A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one of the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at The University of Michigan.